Holiday fun with stickers

Instagram wants you to make your Stories even more joyful with all-new holiday stickers and a candy cane brush. Yes, starting today you can use stickers to add some context to your Stories. In addition to regular stickers, holiday-themed packs will be available through the app for the next few weeks.

Another set of stickers will be arriving in time to ring in the new year.

“Subtle stickers let your photo or video shine, whereas vibrant stickers bring an extra pop of color to your story,” said Instagram. To access stickers while editing a photo or video, tap a new Stickers icon at the top of the screen. You can rotate and resize a sticker with a pinch-zoom gesture, delete a sticker by dragging and dropping it on the trashcan icon at the bottom of the screen and more.

Some stickers can have optional things on them, such as the current time or weather conditions based on information from your device and your current location.

You can even add a sticker with your location by searching for or selecting nearby options. Other people can then tap any such sticker to learn more about its underlying location (not to worry—your Story won’t show up on the location page itself).

You can add as many stickers as you want to any part of your Story.

Text enhancements and hands-free camera

Expanding the initial set of tools for creating text, Instagram for iPhone now permits you to adorn your media with as many pieces of text as you’d like. Just keep adding as much text to a photo or video as you’d like by tapping the Text button.

Newly added formatting options for text include left, centered and right justification. Use a new slider to adjust typeface size with automatic text wrap or rotate/resize a block of text by using two fingers to pinch and zoom.

Another new option in the Format picker lets you record a video without having to press and hold. Just swipe left at the bottom of the screen and tap the new Hands-Free button to launch the camera in hands-free mode.

Simply tap to start recording a video.

Last but not least, Instagram for iOS now lets you save an entire Story from the past 24 hours to your iPhone’s Camera roll as a single video. This lets you import your Stories video in other apps, share the video on other social media services and more.